Usenet has made a unique contribution to the world of computing. It
was the first attempt to create a network beyond local BBS communities
(which themselves were fairly new). At a time when the 'internet'
was a network of privately operated ARPANET sites, Usenet offered a
network for the general public. We at Giganews have recently had the
opportunity to discuss the creation and evolution of Usenet with the
people who developed, maintained, and made significant contributions
to the Usenet culture.

The majority of our interview subjects experienced a Usenet that
was markedly different from what we enjoy today. Access to Usenet
was limited enough that for a number of years, one could read every
article in every group in one quick daily session.

Although most of the communication on Usenet was technically oriented,
casual conversation was also popular, and more and more machines joined
the network. To keep up with demand and handle growing amounts of data,
the underlying software powering Usenet was updated and rewritten
numerous times by the same people that participated in the newsgroups.

Usenet was not only an important technical development; many social
aspects of online communication were introduced, refined, and became
de facto standards thanks to Usenet. Emoticons, flame wars, trolls,
signatures, and even slang acronyms (BRB, LOL) found their first common
usage on Usenet.

Compared to other technologies, computers have evolved (and are still
evolving) at a whirlwind pace. Consequently, the history of computing
has been muddied by innovations that quickly become obsolete, concurrent
developments that solve the same issues, and developers discarding
documentation of simple projects that became extremely successful.

Due to these issues, the archive provided by Usenet is a fine source of
primary information from the most recent decades of computing. Usenet's
history is not just relevant to social networks, but to many high-tech
concepts and innovations.

Usenet began as a personal project for two Duke University
graduate students, Tom Truscott and
Jim Ellis. They wished
to replace a local BBS-style announcement system that was made
obsolete with a recent hardware upgrade. Steve
Bellovin assisted with writing scripts, and the "netnews"
program was born, linking Duke and the University of North
Carolina. This software was soon made available to the public as
"A News" (or simply "news" at the time,) which is
considered the first Usenet package.

Usenet swiftly grew over a period of nearly two years and traffic
eclipsed the abilities of "A News" to efficiently handle. Mark Horton, at the time a Cal-Berkeley
student, and Matt Glickman, then a high school student, wrote "B
News" to overcome the limitations of "A News". B News
would become the most popular Usenet package at the time. Taking
advantage of Cal-Berkeley's DARPA connection, Horton also created a
link between ARPANET (the government-operated "internet"
of the time) and Usenet. Development of B News was passed on to Rick Adams in 1983 and continued until 1989.

Beyond B News, Rick Adams was an extremely
influential figure for Usenet and the Internet at large. Adams
recognized that the growing amount of Usenet traffic was leading
to tremendous costs for site operators. With a loan from USENIX,
Adams founded UUNET as a nonprofit ISP and primarily provided Usenet
feeds, email exchange, and a large repository of Unix software and
documentation. UUNET was a very successful endeavor, paying off its
initial loan and turning a profit within two years. UUNET was one of
the very first commercial ISPs and set the precedent for success for
many ISPs in the 90's.

Usenet's growth continued to exceed the expectations of developers and
site operators alike. The addition of more servers and their users
led to disorder and chaos. Recognizing this, Mark
Horton kept notes on major Usenet sites and their administrators.
With this information, Gene Spafford
organized the "Backbone Cabal" to promote coordination between
Usenet hosts with regard to issues such as managing article propagation,
approving new newsgroups, and similar activities.

The Backbone Cabal was largely responsible for organizing, initiating,
and pushing through "The Great Renaming" in 1987, which
created the top-level hierarchies currently found on Usenet. The
Backbone Cabal was active in some form until 1993, when Gene Spafford
ceased all Usenet management duties.

Usenet's original distribution protocol, UUCP, depended on direct
computer-to-computer links using standard telephone lines. By the
mid-80's, the TCP/IP protocol was entering widespread usage, the
'always-on' internet and Ethernet local area networks were becoming
more popular, and the personal computer was a more common sight than
ever. Phil Lapsley, Erik
Fair, and Brian Kantor created the
NNTP protocol to bring these cutting-edge networking concepts to
Usenet. NNTP's development led to newsreader clients that could
be installed on a user's personal computer and retrieve only the
articles they wanted. NNTP helped further reduce the operating costs
for Usenet hosts as well as ensure the network would remain popular
to new users. Prior to the release of the InterNetNews server package,
NNTP and UUCP shared the distribution of Usenet traffic.

Rick Adams' success with UUNET and B News
had gained him a considerable amount of influence amongst the Usenet
community. In 1987, Adams, Gene Spafford,
and other Cabal members proposed a reorganization of Usenet which
would expand the top-level hierarchies and standardize the naming
of newsgroups. Prior to The Great Renaming, there existed only
three worldwide hierarchies, net.*, mod.*, and fa.*, and groups were
organized within these hierarchies based simply on whether or not
they were moderated and whether they originated from ARPANET. The
Great Renaming sought to alleviate the difficulties associated with
administering a loosely organized Usenet and also to make it easier
for Usenet users and networks to decide which newsgroups they were
interested in visiting or carrying.

Because many users were distrustful of any Cabal activities, there was
much debate around the renaming, with some opponents claiming that the
new system would limit their ability to express themselves. After
extensive discussion and argument, the "Big Seven", misc.*,
comp.*, sci.*, soc.*, talk.*, rec.*, and news.*, hierarchies were
created and Usenet newsgroups were organized within these categories
according to their topic. After The Great Renaming, the creation and
organization of new newsgroups became an automated voting process,
which is still in place today. Ironically, this process also played
a major part in the decline and eventual disbanding of the Cabal.

A major event tied to the Great Renaming was the creation of the alt.*
hierarchy, an event credited to Brian Reid,
Gordon Moffett and John Gilmore. According
to the structure established with the Great Renaming, the talk.*
hierarchy was to be used for all discussions of sensitive, controversial,
or otherwise taboo issues. Because talk.* was subject to the
Cabal's influence, any proposed newsgroup in the hierarchy had to be
approved before it was created. To John Gilmore, this seemed inappropriate
for a hierarchy ostensibly focused on free speech. His opinion was
solidified when his request to create the newsgroup rec.drugs
was denied, nor was an alternate talk.drugs group allowed.

Brian Reid, a member of the backbone Cabal, was also dissatisfied
with their management of the renamed newsgroup hierarchies. He was
the moderator of the very popular mod.gourmand group and was
not satisfied with the renaming of his group to the less attractive
rec.food.recipies.

Reid and Gilmore shared their frustrations in person and decided that
the best solution would be to create a new hierarchy, free from the
Cabal's influence, where any user with the technical know-how could
create a newsgroup. This hierarchy would be available to any Usenet
site but would be distinct from the "Big 7" hierarchies of
the Cabal. They decided on the simple title of "alt" for
their new top-level hierarchy. The first alt.* newsgroups were
alt.sex, alt.drugs, and through logical extension,
alt.rock-n-roll. Today, the alt.* hierarchy is by
far the most populous on Usenet.

C News was a news server package, co-developed by University of
Toronto staff members Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer as a replacement for B News. C
News began as the result of a bug in the B News program which inspired
Henry Spencer to completely rewrite the code, resulting in a cleaner,
faster program. After this initial reworking, Geoff Collyer became
interested in the core of B News, which, though still functional,
was inefficient. After his rewrite of this section, the processing
of news through B News became faster and led to the partners creating
an entirely new server package, which became C News. Development of
C News continued into the mid-1990s, including the creation of a new
index function called NOV (or News Overview) in 1992. This change,
which is still used today in the form of the NNTP XOVER command, allowed
newsreaders to rapidly retrieve header and threading information with
relatively little load on the server.

The software which superseded C News was released by Rich Salz in
1991. This news server package, called InterNetNews or INN, was the
first news server package to fully integrate NNTP functionality. INN's
predecessors, such as B and C News, processed articles individually
or in batches while the INN server was able to receive and distribute
articles through a single long-running process. INN is now the most
commonly used news server package and is still actively developed by
the Internet Systems Consortium.

In the summer of 1998, Giganews officially opened its news servers to
the world. As other independent news services started to establish
themselves in the Internet community, word of Giganews' high-quality
newsfeed and exemplary member service started to get around and the
service offerings expanded. Today, Giganews is the world's largest
newsgroup provider, offering record breaking retention and high service
level quality.

Starting in 2006 Giganews began to further raise the bar for the Usenet
community by launching several premium features for its Usenet access
services. These service improvements included providing the world's
first news server with 100 days binary retention in all binary groups,
deploying 256-bit Encrypted Usenet Access, and, ultimately, an even
larger upgrade to 200 days retention in all binary newsgroups. These
service improvements created an environment fostering greater access
for the Usenet community to volumes of data not even dreamed of during
Usenet's early days.

In 2011, Giganews announced to partner with Golden Frog to provide
customers with their VyprVPN service. VyprVPN is a personal Virtual
Private Network (VPN) service that uses PPTP, L2TP/IPsec, and OpenVPN
protocols to protect online privacy using a secure, encrypted connection
to the Internet. Golden Frog’s VyprVPN App allows Giganews members to
automatically configure and easily manage their VyprVPN connections.

Giganews became the first Usenet Provider to reach 2,000 days of
retention. That's over 5.5 years of access and represents more than
25 petabytes of Usenet messages on Giganews servers. Click here to
see what 2000 days of retention looks like.

Giganews is dedicated to their users looking to continually improve
the user experience. After almost 20 years of service, Giganews
continues to be the world's best Usenet provider. Providing over 5
years of binary retention, unlimited speed, and award-winning support.